Lab Director

Lendra Friesen, Ph.D., is the Lab Director of the Cochlear Implant Brain and Behavior Lab, which she founded in 2014.  Lendra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Connecticut, where she lectures on cochlear implants, anatomy and physiology, and advanced electrophysiology.

Lendra has worked clinically and has conducted research on hearing and cochlear implants for over 25 years.  Dr Friesen began her audiology career at the House Ear Clinic in Los Angeles, where she worked in the clinic for a year and then embarked on cochlear implant research under the supervision of Dr Bob Shannon at the associated House Ear Institute.  It was while working at the House Ear Institute that she published her most well-known paper: Friesen et al (2001) “Speech recognition in noise as a function of the number of spectral channels: comparison of acoustic hearing and cochlear implants”, J Acoust Soc Am, 110, 1150-1163. This paper has become one of the most cited papers in the field of cochlear implants with over 900 citations.  Lendra went on to get her Ph.D. at the University of Washington, under the supervision of Dr. Kelly Tremblay, where she studied auditory evoked potentials. She then started her lab and became the cochlear implant research director at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, was a professor the University of Toronto, and an affiliate of the Rotman Research Institute.

Current AuD students

Sara Basquez
Maura Beggins
Shannon McGee
Stephanie Rand

Current undergrad students

Lilly Mastrogiovanni
Jeanne Wang

Lab alumni

AuD students

Melissa Colwell
Miwako Hisagi
Casey Borstel
Olivia DeWald
Jesslyn Oriciuch
Marc Marcel
Ariana Glyde
Jamie Conti
Nicole Gottschalk

Honors and undergrad students

Jordan Bellucci
Katherine Chiemelski
Kara Sanders